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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Rove: Draft dodger/tax evader

All of the news stories say that Karl Rove is coming back to Texas after leaving the Bush administration and plans to live in Ingram so that he can be near his son who is attending Trinity University in San Antonio. Ingram is a little Hill Country town just down the road from Kerrville about an hour’s drive northwest of San Antonio.The interesting thing is that Rove doesn’t actually have a home in Ingram. He has a cottage. From his Wikipedia entry: "The residence that Rove claims on Texas voter registration rolls consists of two small rental cottages, the largest of which is 814 square feet. The cottages were part of the River Oaks Lodge that Rove and his wife, Darby, once owned on the Guadalupe River near Ingram. The Roves sold the lodge in 2003, after renovating it, but kept the two cottages, which the lodge rents to guests."

Rove had been using the lodges as his “place of residence” so that he could avoid paying property taxes on his million-dollar home in Washington, D.C. But that came to an end in 2005 when the District of Columbia changed its law and Rove ended up having to pay $3,400 in back taxes. I doubt that Rove plans to stay in the Hill Country for long. He sold his Austin residence a few years ago and now owns another million dollar house in Florida.I read through Rove’s biography on Wikipedia trying to glean any sense of humanity that I could empathize with. He apparently suffered some hard breaks growing up with his biological father abandoning the family shortly after he was born. His adoptive father and mother divorced when he was 19 and then his mother committed suicide when he was 31.He was a college drop-out who appears to have used his on-again, off-again college status as a means to avoid the draft.

In December 1969, the Selective Service System held its first lottery drawing. Those born on December 25, like Rove, received number 84. That number placed him in the middle of those (with numbers 1 [first priority] through 195) who would eventually be drafted.On February 17, 1970, Rove was reclassified as 2-S, a deferment from the draft because of his enrollment at the University of Utah in the fall of 1969. He maintained this deferment until December 14, 1971, despite being only a part-time student in the autumn and spring quarters of 1971 (registered for between six and 12 credit hours) and dropping out of the university in June 1971. Rove was a student at the University of Maryland, College Park in the fall of 1971; as such, he would have been eligible for 2-S status, but registrar's records show that he withdrew from classes during the first half of the semester. In December 1971 he was reclassified as 1-A. On April 27, 1972, he was reclassified as 1-H, or "not currently subject to processing for induction". The draft ended on June 30, 1973.

Rove was one of the major architects of the Iraq War, but did everything he could possibly do to avoid the War in Vietnam.